Great game, but sometimes tedious.

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great use of Wii controls. Fun. Great items and upgrades. Challenging.

Cons: Cut scenes too long, can't be skipped. Too much retracing your steps.

The Bottom Line: 
Buy it. You won't regret it.

Author's Review
Metroid Prime for Wii is overall a great game. I love the first-person view and the controls, especially for aiming and shooting. When I started playing this game for the first time, I thought “This is why the Wii is great!” If only more games were designed to use the Wii controllers so effectively and intuitively. The game is very creative, and the puzzles are challenging. There is so much to do and explore that you really don’t get bored playing this game. However, at times I do get very frustrated playing Metroid Prime, but that really isn’t any different than the other Metroid games. To explain: If you take the Zelda game for Wii and play it, it has a nice linear story line that you can follow from start to finish. There are tons of other things you can explore, lots of side stories, extra puzzles, etc that aren’t required to complete the game but make it more fun and encourage you to go back and play it later. Metroid Prime is similar in a lot of those elements, except that the path from start to finish appears less linear. There are times in the game where I really didn’t know what to do next, or what I was looking for, and I had to result to online help in order to continue. Unlike most games where you complete a level and then move on, as you enter more and more areas in Metroid Prime, the area of play just keeps getting larger and larger and you find yourself continually retracing your steps. This gets a bit tedious, and it would have been nice if more expedited travel options were available. (Yes, you can use your ship to move between landing sites on each planet, but the cut scenes showing your ship flying get old fast. They are way too long and there’s apparently no way to skip them….ugh!)

This game would be GREAT with a multiplayer feature. Without that though, I have to just give it a lowercase great. Challenging, fun, and worth buying. Just make sure you have help available if you get stuck, or you might lose interest.